Painting enables me to understand more about the world around me, it is a way of re-thinking. My relationships, family, culture and memories. My body. How it feels to 'be'. The landscapes in my head.

Sometimes painting is like dancing, a balance of directed movement and response. I usually paint to music, especially my dream landscapes and I try to keep a balance of figurative work and something that is a little more abstract. While I paint my hands perform a kind of dance with the canvas, I catch them moving in odd ways, forming shapes that seem almost symbolic and while some of my paintings are an attempt to control this movement, sometimes I just let them free.

I am interested in character, what it is to see from another person's point of view and know the world through their thoughts.  I build characters, taking interviews, talking to people or working from memories, then, through writing down their life story I try to understand that characters internal landscape. I wear the character, like an actor in a play and try to see how they see. I paint for them, as if they were painting.  Paint as it were, through their eyes and hands.

In some ways I think of my paintings as maps, linking together landscapes and people in a way that imitates the interconnectedness of landscape and character. Like windows looking in on another world, or perhaps, another person. 

A map is a cartographic link to a particular space. It's use of proportionate representation and symbolism allows the viewer to 'understand' it and perhaps to even gain a a small sense of the feeling of the space. Similarly, a painting can also be a map, a link to both real and imaginary spaces and times connected through routes traced only through the artist's mind.

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